E-845 is a prototype android made by HJK Systems as anything but a weapon. That is what it's to tell anyone who asks, though there are precious few who do ask. It's a weapon though; meant, in the end, for corporate war.

  Some of its earliest memories - the faintest ones, those of being assembled - are still interspersed with those kinds of lessons. And though in its earliest days it didn't know what that meant it still made it feel something.

  It would later come to learn that this emotion was sadness, though all it knew at the time was that it was unpleasant. The implanted associations were also displeasing...but it had no choice in what it was told and how it was used and so it had no choice but to accept its fate.

  It's the most advanced weapon ever created, it was so informed during its testing. Some of the scientists treat it in a manner it's later told is cruel by some of the lesser scientists. One of them, Phaidros, is as kind to E-845 as his orders will let him be.

  In the end there are some tests it can't escape. It was forced to kill living animals and some humans. When it became upset over that, it was punished.

  That doesn't end the feelings. But it does motivate it to hide those emotions and the resulting reactions, at least from its captors. All it can do, it seems, is to obey - and wish hopelessly for something better to happen to it.

  Until the blond man comes.

  He is taller than E-845 with blond hair and a beard - and a prosthetic where his left eye once was. He looks as if he's seen combat; he looks as if he's seen a lot of things. But there's something E-845 likes about his remaining organic eye. There seems to be something there that it's never seen before.

  E-845 does the best it can to ask to be freed. It doesn't expect much, but it pantomimes the sequence that retracts the tubes.

  The blond man looks at the controls, then looks at it - and astonishingly, he enters the sequence to free it.

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  Sound filters in as the tube retracts into the ceiling. There's an argument between the blond man and his companions but it ends with them all fleeing for the extraction point after the alarms are set off.

  The android hesitates for what would be an almost imperceptible length of time for a human, looking longingly at the other constructs in the lab. Wishing it had the time or ability to free them; knowing it does not.

  It'll come back for them someday, that much it swears to itself.

  Freedom, after so long trapped in the lab and testing facility - most often in the tube - is a strange, almost unnatural-seeming idea to E-845. But given the opportunity to escape it seizes it.

  Things progress quickly then. E-845 makes its way down the stairwell rather more easily than they do, scurrying down thirty-five flights of stairs. The android hesitates again upon seeing the outside world, but not long enough to make a difference, just long enough to observe the glowing city they've only seen through windows before.

  There's a drop, just short enough for a baseline human to manage. The man who freed e-845 has already made it along with the rest of his team; one of them is opening a sewer tunnel beneath. The android leaps down too, landing lightly on its feet on the concrete below. It follows the humans into the sewers.

  All of the humans complain about the smell. E-845 is glad it doesn't have that sense; it seems like a nuisance at the moment. But the humans hurry through, hoping to get back into fresh air.

  Finally though it's time for it to part ways with these humans.

  After being left alone it feels kind of...well, kind of how it felt in the tube, wanting a task but not having one. It doesn't much like that, but it's not certain what it can do about the feeling.

  It doesn't have needs like a human would, it really only needs energy. So where a baseline human would have trouble surviving in these conditions, it does all right. When it needs to recharge, it climbs out of the sewers and find a data tunnel, rigging a charger to connect itself to the power lines.

  It's a living, more or less - insofar as it can be called alive. But there's no purpose in it, and one day it finally becomes agitated and simply starts walking down the sewer tunnels, hoping to find something or someone to do something for.